Rise From The Ashes
"Burnout to Brilliance: Great CEOs, No Burnout"
Leadership is tough. Burnout makes it tougher.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rise From The Ashes is the ultimate podcast for visionary CEOs and executives who refuse to let burnout rob them of their brilliance, legacy, and impact.
Hosted by Baz Porter, this show isn’t just about surviving leadership it’s about transforming it. Each week, we delve deep into the art and science of thriving at the top, combining actionable strategies, spiritual alignment, and raw truths that reignite your purpose and optimize your energy.
Here’s what you’ll get:
- Bold Frameworks: Learn the exact steps to conquer decision fatigue, streamline your mental energy, and reclaim control of your leadership.
- Spiritual Awakenings: Explore the intersection of purpose, alignment, and success to lead with clarity and connection.
- Transformational Insights: Hear unfiltered stories and practical wisdom from world-class leaders who’ve turned their burnout into brilliance.
This isn’t just a podcast it’s a revolution for leaders ready to rise, inspire, and leave a legacy that outlasts them.
Rise From The Ashes
She Found Her Husband After His Suicide. What Came Next Redefined Joy.
What do you do when life rips everything from you and then comes back for what’s left?
Michelle Collins didn’t just face one tragedy.
She faced three. Back to back. And each one tried to end her.
First, she lost her mother to leukemia.
Then a brutal divorce.
Then Glenn her Navy SEAL husband died by suicide.
Michelle was the one who found him.
What followed? PTSD. Dissociation. Substance use. Rage. Despair.
She couldn’t put on her socks let alone hold her life together.
But she didn’t stay broken.
This episode of Rising From the Ashes is not about “resilience.”
It’s about surviving when your soul is splintered and the tools they give you don’t fucking work.
🔥 In this raw and ruthless episode:
• What it feels like to completely lose your mind after suicide loss
• The truth about trauma, addiction, and your nervous system breaking down
• Why yoga and therapy weren’t enough and what actually saved her
• The moment sobriety started (and what almost stopped it)
• How Michelle built Inhabit Joy while still healing in real time
• And why “joy” isn’t a destination it’s a rebellious choice in hell
This isn’t inspiration.
This is survival alchemy.
🎧 Listen now. And if you know someone barely holding it together, send this. It might save them.
Friends, as we wrap up today’s powerful conversation, hear me loud and clear: I’m grateful for you. You’ve chosen greatness over settling, clarity over chaos, and brilliance over burnout. Remember Great CEOs deserve NO burnout.
Did this hit home? Pass it on. Your share could be the spark someone desperately needs. Together, we’re rewriting the rules of leadership, one bold conversation at a time.
I want to hear YOUR story your wins, your struggles, your breakthroughs. My door is wide open whether you’re in Boulder or reaching out at support@ramsbybaz.com, I'm here.
Here is a gift For you Click Here
Are you ready to drop confusion, claim clarity, and step powerfully into purpose?
Let’s connect. Book a coaching session today and experience firsthand how the RAMS framework amplifies results, shatters limits, and creates lasting legacies.
This is Baz Porter, in your corner, fiercely committed to your brilliance. Keep rising, stay unstoppable, and know you’re never alone in this climb.
Until next time rise boldly.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of Rice and the Ashes. I cannot remember what episode this is, because we've done so many. We're approaching 100, which is amazing, and I thank you for all your support. Today I have the privilege and honor to interview and have a conversation with Michelle Collins. Michelle Collins has been through a lot. Michelle Collins, michelle Collins has been through a lot. It is an understatement, and I asked her to come on because her story is not just one of perseverance, but one of really grit and understanding herself and finding not only herself but helping thousands of other people. Michelle, please welcome and how are you today? And please tell the audience who you are and what you do.
Speaker 2:Thank you, baz. I am great today. I it's spring right now and it's my favorite season. Every day there's a new beautiful blossom to observe and appreciate. So I just feel like it's the season of joy and, of course, my business is called Inhabit Joy, and there's a reason for that. What I learned through my difficult periods in life was that there is always joy, there is joy, it, and over the course of my recovery if you will I don't know that's the proper word, but my finding my new life after trauma and grief I realized that, using mindfulness, meditation, this whole big toolbox that I have amassed over the years of study and practice, that really you can feel joy in almost every moment, and that's my goal is to spread that message.
Speaker 1:I love the fact that you say you can feel joy in every moment. It wasn't always that easy for you, though, was it? Oh no, can you go back, if you will, to a time where you're comfortable, where you can remember the constraints and what your journey was, to actually doing this business, actually helping other people?
Speaker 2:helping other people. Yeah, it's interesting that you use the word comfortable, because it's never comfortable to talk about this, to talk about tragedy and pain. But the reason that I do this is because I know that there's a possibility someone listening to this podcast will suffer less because of something I share, maybe just isolation, maybe I'll say something that they will connect to and that makes it worth it to me. Of course, we don't have six hours, so I'm going to very much shorten my journey. I first faced tragedy when my mom was diagnosed with leukemia and I was in my mid-30s, so that's pretty good to go that long before grief and trauma hits my life. I feel very blessed. But my mom was my person. In retrospect we probably had a codependent relationship, but at the time I just was. I had three little kids and a husband and the next three and a half years were spent basically in terror of losing my mom. And the interesting thing is, in my 20s I used to have anxiety and unsupported anxiety. I didn't even realize what it was. We're talking about the 80s and 90s, 1980s, 1990s, giving away my age, but we didn't really talk about things the way we do now. Oh, that's anxiety and these are the things. There weren't 100 podcasts out there you could listen to. You just had to go to a therapist or whatever, and sometimes that wasn't even supported. So I had unsupported anxiety and even in my 20s one of my irrational thoughts was I'm going to lose my mom and I could not survive the loss of my mom and fast forward a few years and I'm facing it three and a half years of leukemia treatment and then she passed and I went through all the stages of grief, plus, I think, I made up some of my own during her illness and then after she died, I just I didn't know about grief. I didn't know about trauma. I didn't. I wasn't educated and I was young. So almost all my friends still had both their parents. I had three little kids. I felt all the things isolated and unsupported and I had to start taking care of my dad after that too. So I had two households to take care of, and not that my dad was perfectly healthy, but he just lost his wife at 50 years. He was not very functional. And then, fast forward a few years. I went through divorce. I went through yoga teacher training, yoga therapy training, personal training, wellness coaching, training. I was just I was reaching out to try to better myself, but also to try to gain some understanding of what makes us tick and why do we get so? Why do some people get so disabled? I was completely disabled by my mom's death, whereas other people just go on, and yoga at that point was my solace. My two yoga classes a week were the only time I felt okay. So that's why I went far in yoga. Studying yoga therapy is a big commitment and I'm still. I still am a certified yoga therapist and I learn about something new every day in the yoga therapy field. It's amazing.
Speaker 2:So after my divorce, I met Glenn Collins and it was just mad love. Like a week after we met, he proposed and I know, and he kept proposing until I finally said yes. He was very tenacious when he got his teeth into something he was not going to let go and he was just everything that I like dreamy. The whole thing was completely dreamy, and so we got married. 90 days after we met, we merged two households. He had three kids.
Speaker 2:I had three kids. Most of them were teenagers at the time and it was just chaos, as you can imagine. So then, a month after we got married, we got a puppy, because that's what you do when you're in chaos, and he was working, I was working. The thing is as chaotic and pressure-filled as that sounds. There was so much joy in our house and I know the kids were really struggling and I see that now.
Speaker 2:At the time I was so consumed with him, I made some poor choices as far as parenting goes and I see that and I regret and I apologize and I take responsibility. So less than two years after we got married, glenn ended his life and there was again a lot of pressure on us and what I didn't know about him when we got married was that he did have some underlying mental illness. Was it PTSD from his 22 years in the service, most of which was spent in the Navy SEAL teams? Was it something from childhood? Was it genetic? I don't know genetic. I don't know he was diagnosed with ptsd, but he was a really good actor and I did not know he was suffering until the suffering got so bad.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that was near the end and there wasn't really anything I could do about it at the time thank you for sharing that uncomfortable time.
Speaker 1:It takes courage to relive it, and I can see within your face those listeners which is listening to this that it is challenging to even speak about it now. So I want to acknowledge your bravery and your commitment to not just other people but yourselves for speaking about something challenging.
Speaker 1:And when I say challenging, that is a very gross understatement. But when I can't explain what Michelle has gone through, I can only feel it. And it's a different vibration. When you go through the other side of that and everything's taken, you think you know the perfect hill household. You've got all of this going for you, the dog working, etc. And all of a sudden you've got all this going for you, the dog working, etc. And all of a sudden you've got disruption through that. Where does your head go after after the few weeks afterwards? Did you just plummet or did you come back and go? I've got to get this, my shit together.
Speaker 2:I need to do this oh no, there was no shit together. I was decimated. I was the one who found his body after he died and that is yeah, thank you. I've worked with a number of suicide widows over the in recent times since I've become a grief educator and grief coach, which is another training, again, trying to understand. For me it's study and practice that can get you through.
Speaker 2:But no, immediately after Glenn died I spiraled and I took every chemical you can think of to try to ease my pain. I did every risky behavior. I was really making my life a lot worse with my choices, but the pain was so overwhelming that I just would have done anything to not feel it and I was completely non-functional. I remember that first week I had to go to the funeral home. First his body goes to the medical examiner and then they call me when it's this and I couldn't get dressed. It was a physical impossibility for me to figure out how to put on my socks, my pants. I remember this so clearly, sitting in my closet trying to figure out how to get dressed. And that's what grief and trauma can do to people. Yeah, and notice how I said can do, because, like I said earlier, it's different for everyone. It's not the same. Some people could have gotten up and gone back to work after that. I didn't go back to work until june and he died in april year was this?
Speaker 2:sorry, michelle 2016, where actually next week will be the nine-year anniversary.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. So this is the point. Yeah, think about this, yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I spiraled and I developed PTSD myself, which I didn't know much about. Ptsd know much about PTSD. I had a therapist at the time who was a relationship therapist, very supportive, through my divorce and through my marriage with Glenn, and her brother was actually Navy SEAL, so she had some understanding too, some real insight into their lives, which helped. But after I developed PTSD and the way that I found that out was I started dissociating and having flashbacks. So at the scene of his death I dissociated and for people who don't know what that means, if you haven't had an extreme traumatic situation or had your nervous system completely overwhelmed, this may not have happened to you. That's what trauma is, when your nervous system is overwhelmed, and it can be something small or something huge, like finding your husband after he took his life.
Speaker 2:Dissociated in that moment meant I released. My consciousness, was not in my body. It was like I was watching the scene from above, like I was floating above the scene, watching myself run and get. The police were already there, but they were looking in a different place. Get the police, all of that. It's like I was in my body one second and then I would be back out of my body and this only happened for a day or so, but then after a few months, which is when that's trauma and then when the post-traumatic stress. It takes some months before that's a diagnosis, because it's part of the diagnosis is that it is continuing. So it might for some people they may have survived the trauma and never gone into PTSD.
Speaker 2:When that happened, my trauma therapist sent me. My therapist sent me to a trauma therapist who specialized in trauma and I was able to learn some really deep. I had somatic therapy, which worked great for a yogi, because none of the tools I had worked, because I couldn't use them. I was too traumatized, I was disconnected from my body and that's dissociation. So I spent the next many months in intensive trauma therapy therapy, working with her. I stopped taking all the medicines prescribed and illegal.
Speaker 2:Not prescribed, I stopped all the stuff I was still drinking, but I actually did quit drinking a year later and have been sober since 2018. Sober from alcohol Congratulations, Thank you. Yeah, it's an excellent decision for me. I know it's not for everybody, but when I am teaching health and wellbeing especially mental health and wellbeing I need I, in my opinion, I need to also demonstrate as much as I can, and for me and the type of use of abuse of alcohol that I did, it's something I need to have completely out of my life in order to be fully present, and being fully present is the opposite of what I described with PTSD. So that's how I ended up in mindfulness meditation.
Speaker 2:All of that came after Glenn's death. I did meditation as part of yoga, of course, but I learned separate meditation after he died and then I did a two-year mindfulness meditation teacher training, which is based in modern mindfulness and Buddhism. So it's really all about presence and it has been an incredible journey. And now I'm at the point where I can tell my story and coach people to suffer less and feel better and recover from grief and get through grief. So it's been quite a journey.
Speaker 1:Thank you for sharing. Well, you've just shared. I don't know how difficult that was For my listeners. Before we end part one, I really want to hone in on something new, and that's people's perceptions of grief and trauma. Everybody, as Michelle just said there, everybody's response is different, and none is less concerning or less than you make it. So don't be judging yourself in imposter syndrome well, somebody else's grief, or someone else has done this or that. We're all individuals. We're all on our own journey. We deal with things in different ways because we have different values and different upbringings.
Speaker 2:And different nervous system wiring Correct. Some people are born with more resilient nervous systems. It's just how you're wired, correct. So some people have to work harder to get to stasis, to get to balance I love the michelle and I would ask for part one.
Speaker 1:Part two is where we ascend and we come from the the hardship into the service of others, and I find this happens a lot with people who have had challenging times, which is why the podcast is called Rise from the Ashes. It came to Phoenix and a perfect example of that is this present guest with Michelle. Michelle, thank you for your time. I love speaking with you, my listeners. Please share the message. It will change somebody's life, I promise you. In the next part we're going to talk about her book, what she actually does, who she became and, more importantly, what's next. Thank you very much, see you on the next episode. Download, enjoy and share the message from michelle. Thank you very much, see you soon.
.png)
